Answers to the Late-Course Memory Checks

REFERENCE · CHAPTERS 29–41 ANSWER KEY

Use these answers only after you have completed the matching chapter memory check with your notes closed. The point is to compare your explanation with the model, then repair whatever you could not retrieve or connect.

Chapter 29 Answers: Trace Containment From Europe to Asia

1. Kennan favored patient political and economic resistance at strategically important centers of power. By the early 1950s, containment had become a much broader global military commitment supported by alliances, defense buildup, and wars such as Korea.

2. The Truman Doctrine supplied political and economic support to governments resisting communist pressure, while the Marshall Plan used large-scale economic reconstruction to stabilize Western Europe and reduce the appeal of communist parties. Both applied containment through non-Soviet means before the policy became more militarized.

3. Western unification of occupation zones and introduction of a new currency contributed to the Soviet blockade of ground routes to West Berlin in 1948. The United States and Britain supplied the city by air until the blockade ended in 1949.

4. NATO committed the United States to a permanent peacetime military alliance based on collective defense, a major departure from the older tradition of avoiding permanent European security commitments.

5. The Soviet atomic test ended the U.S. nuclear monopoly, while the Communist victory in China appeared to expand communist power dramatically. Together they intensified fear that the global balance was shifting.

6. Truman fired MacArthur after the general publicly challenged the administration’s limited-war policy and advocated expanding the conflict toward China. The decision affirmed civilian control and showed that containment did not mean pursuing unlimited military victory at any cost.

Chapter 30 Answers: Explain the Contradictions of Postwar Prosperity

1. Pent-up consumer demand and wartime savings, high U.S. productive capacity after the war, low unemployment and rising wages, the baby boom, housing expansion, and federal veteran benefits all supported sustained growth.

2. Federal highways made long-distance commuting easier and encouraged suburban development, retail decentralization, and automobile dependence. Discriminatory housing policy and private practices helped channel many white families into suburbs while Black families faced barriers, contributing to racial and fiscal separation between suburbs and central cities.

3. The GI Bill was formally broad, but segregation in colleges, discriminatory admissions, mortgage redlining, and local implementation prevented many Black veterans from receiving the same educational and homeownership benefits as white veterans.

4. Real cases included Soviet espionage networks, the Hiss case, and the Rosenberg case. Fear expanded into loyalty investigations, HUAC hearings, blacklists, and accusations that often reached people who were never proven to have committed espionage.

5. Televised Army-McCarthy hearings exposed McCarthy’s accusatory tactics to a national audience. The Senate censured him in 1954, and his political influence collapsed.

Chapter 31 Answers: Rebuild the Civil Rights Movement From Local Organizing Up

1. Examples include NAACP litigation led by lawyers such as Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall, A. Philip Randolph’s wartime pressure campaign, Double V activism, local voter-registration efforts, church networks, labor alliances, and community organizing.

2. Brown held that state-required segregation in public schools violated equal protection. Brown II’s phrase all deliberate speed supplied no firm deadline, allowing many districts to delay desegregation.

3. The boycott lasted more than a year and depended on car pools, fundraising, communication, churches, local leadership, and thousands of participants willing to avoid segregated buses. Rosa Parks’s arrest triggered the campaign, but organization sustained it.

4. Birmingham televised police dogs and fire hoses used against demonstrators, while Selma televised the Bloody Sunday attack on marchers. The images widened national pressure on federal officials and Congress.

5. The Civil Rights Act attacked segregation in public accommodations and discrimination in employment. The Voting Rights Act targeted discriminatory barriers to voting and gave the federal government stronger enforcement authority.

6. After 1965 activists addressed northern and western segregation, economic inequality, policing, housing, Black Power, and other issues, while new movements adapted civil-rights tactics. Major legal victories changed the struggle; they did not finish it.

Chapter 32 Answers: Trace the Political Breakup of the 1960s

1. Medicare provides federal health insurance primarily for older Americans; Medicaid is a federal-state health program for qualifying low-income people; ESEA increased federal aid to education, especially for lower-income students; Head Start supports early childhood education; the War on Poverty created programs aimed at economic disadvantage.

2. The resolution authorized the president to use broad military force in Southeast Asia without a formal declaration of war, enlarging executive discretion after the reported Gulf of Tonkin incidents.

3. Tet failed to hold territory and imposed heavy losses on Communist forces, but its scale contradicted U.S. claims of imminent progress and deepened the credibility gap at home.

4. King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated; the Tet Offensive transformed war politics; urban unrest continued; and police-protester clashes at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago dramatized political division.

5. The women’s movement used litigation, legislation, organizations such as NOW, and campaigns for the ERA and workplace and educational equality. Chicano activists organized around labor, education, representation, and cultural pride. AIM emphasized Native sovereignty, treaty rights, and opposition to federal and local abuses.

Chapter 33 Answers: Follow the Conservative Turn Back to Its 1970s Roots

1. The Southern Strategy appealed to white voters disturbed by civil-rights change through themes such as law and order, states’ rights, and opposition to some federal interventions. It contributed to a longer realignment of white southern voters toward the Republican Party; the change was gradual and had roots before Nixon.

2. Nixon became the first president to resign after evidence tied his administration to obstruction and abuse of power during the Watergate investigation. The scandal reinforced post-Vietnam distrust of executive power and government credibility.

3. Stagflation combined high inflation with weak growth and high unemployment, challenging the expectation that policymakers could treat inflation and unemployment as a stable tradeoff.

4. The embargo and price shock showed that U.S. transport and industry depended heavily on global petroleum supplies and that Middle Eastern politics could affect everyday prices and economic growth.

5. Détente was an easing and management of superpower tensions through diplomacy and arms agreements. The 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan sharply damaged that approach and renewed confrontation.

6. Examples include Proposition 13 and wider tax revolt, evangelical political organization such as the Moral Majority, backlash over social and cultural issues, inflation and economic frustration, distrust after Vietnam and Watergate, and business anti-regulatory organizing.

Chapter 34 Answers: Separate Reagan’s Impact From the Causes of Soviet Collapse

1. Goldwater’s 1964 campaign, Nixon-era southern realignment, tax revolts, business mobilization, and evangelical political activism all predated Reagan and helped build his coalition.

2. Supply-side policy argued that lower marginal tax rates would increase incentives for work, investment, and growth. Reagan also supported large defense increases, and deficits rose sharply, creating tension with his rhetoric of fiscal restraint.

3. Reagan fired striking PATCO controllers after they refused his order to return to work. The action weakened a major union and signaled that the federal government would take a harder line toward organized labor.

4. Global competition, offshoring in some industries, automation, productivity gains, and changing investment patterns reduced manufacturing employment in many Rust Belt communities while services and technology grew elsewhere.

5. Glasnost meant greater openness; perestroika meant restructuring. They were intended to revive the Soviet system but loosened political controls, exposed criticism, and failed to solve deep economic problems, increasing instability.

6. Factors include Soviet economic stagnation, Afghanistan, Gorbachev reforms, Eastern European popular movements such as Solidarity, reduced Soviet willingness to use force in Eastern Europe, nationalist pressures inside the USSR, arms and defense pressure, and U.S.-Soviet diplomacy.

Chapter 35 Answers: Map the Post-Cold War United States

1. The Gulf War demonstrated U.S. ability to lead a large international coalition and deploy overwhelming conventional force after the Cold War. The coalition limited its stated objective to expelling Iraqi forces from Kuwait and did not march to Baghdad to overthrow Saddam Hussein in 1991.

2. Bosnia and Kosovo raised the question of whether NATO and U.S. military force should be used to stop mass atrocities inside sovereign states and what legal or international authority should justify such intervention.

3. Afghanistan followed the September 11 attacks and targeted al-Qaeda and its Taliban hosts. Iraq was invaded separately in 2003 on a different set of security claims. Domestic changes included the PATRIOT Act, creation of DHS, airport and security restructuring, and expanded surveillance authorities.

4. Trade agreements increased international economic integration while automation, productivity, global competition, supply chains, and digital technology changed the location and type of work. New technology industries grew as some older manufacturing employment declined.

5. The 1996 law replaced the former federal cash-assistance entitlement structure with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families block grants to states, work requirements, and time limits.

6. TARP, Federal Reserve intervention, fiscal stimulus, and later regulation brought the federal government deeply into financial and macroeconomic stabilization, reviving arguments over market failure, bailouts, regulation, and fairness similar in broad form to debates surrounding the New Deal.

Chapter 36 Answers: Write Three SAQ Points Without Wasting Words

1. Three parts per SAQ; each part is scored independently for one point.

2. SAQ 1 includes two secondary text sources; SAQ 2 includes a primary text source; SAQ 3 includes a primary or secondary non-text source. All three questions are required and focus on different historical periods.

3. Describe identifies a relevant characteristic or development with enough specificity to show what it is. Explain adds how or why a relationship, cause, effect, similarity, difference, or development exists.

4. A strong compact response includes a direct claim, specific historical evidence when the part requires it, and an explicit relationship explaining how the evidence answers the prompt.

5. A fact can earn zero if it is outside the date range, too vague, directed at the wrong group or domain, or merely named without the explanation the verb requires.

Chapter 37 Answers: Make the Documents Work for the Thesis

1. DBQ core rubric: thesis, contextualization, document evidence, outside evidence, sourcing, and complex understanding. Document evidence has two possible points, producing seven total points.

2. Documents can directly support a claim, complicate or counter a claim, provide a causal bridge, supply corroboration, or offer a sourcing opportunity tied to the argument.

3. A restatement thesis has no line of reasoning and cannot organize conflicting or qualifying evidence into analytic categories.

4. Outside evidence must add a specific relevant fact beyond the documents and use it to support the argument. Repeating a document or prompt fact does not earn the point.

5. Naming author, audience, or purpose is identification. Sourcing explains how or why that feature is relevant to the document’s use in the argument. The current point requires this for at least two documents.

Chapter 38 Answers: Narrow the LEQ Before You Draft

1. Thesis or claim, contextualization, evidence, and analysis and reasoning are the four rubric categories; they total six points because evidence and analysis and reasoning can each earn two.

2. The broad prompt lets the writer focus on one or more referenced developments. The student does not need to cover every decade or every development in the broad time span.

3. Before drafting, sort evidence into direct support, complication or counterevidence, and chronology or control or other categories that fit the argument. The crucial step is deciding what each fact will prove.

4. Narrative tells what happened in sequence. Argument uses events as evidence for a claim and explains the relationship between those facts and the thesis.

5. Complexity can come from multiple causes or effects, both continuity and change, qualification, counterevidence, cross-period connections, or corroborating multiple perspectives. It need not be woven through every line, but it must be part of the argument and more than a phrase.

Chapter 39 Answers: Name the Reasoning Before You Build the Answer

1. Comparison requires a shared dimension. Without one, two descriptions sit next to each other without an analytic relationship.

2. An immediate trigger is a near-term event that sets a development in motion; an underlying condition is a longer-term circumstance that makes the trigger consequential.

3. A continuity and change claim needs a defined time span and must identify both a meaningful continuity and a meaningful change.

4. Example: compare Union and Confederate war capacities while explaining how industrial differences caused different wartime options. This combines comparison with causation.

5. Comparison error: no shared dimension. Causation error: no mechanism or confusion of trigger with underlying cause. Continuity and change error: only change or only continuity, or no time span.

Chapter 40 Answers: Reconstruct the Course From Memory

1. Periods: 1491–1607; 1607–1754; 1754–1800; 1800–1848; 1844–1877; 1865–1898; 1890–1945; 1945–1980; 1980 to present.

2. Answers vary by theme. A valid response names a development in at least four periods and explains the connection, not merely lists terms.

3. Personal answer. The student should identify the two or three recurring categories from the error taxonomy and attach one corrective behavior to each.

4. Retrieval forces the learner to reconstruct information without cues, exposing gaps and strengthening access pathways. Rereading can create familiarity without proving that recall is available under exam conditions.

5. Thematic review supplies evidence across unit boundaries, which is essential for broad LEQs, comparison, and continuity and change questions.

Chapter 41 Answers: Manage the Digital Exam Under Real Time Pressure

1. Bluebook familiarity prevents interface navigation, typing, highlighting, and review tools from consuming attention needed for historical reasoning.

2. MCQ 55 minutes; SAQ 40 minutes; Section II 1 hour 40 minutes total, with a recommended 60 minutes for the DBQ including 15-minute reading and planning and a recommended 40 minutes for the LEQ.

3. Read once for meaning, then identify date, creator or source type, and purpose or claim. Mark only details that affect the question. Avoid rereading without a purpose.

4. Timed typing practice reveals whether planning, keyboard speed, and paragraph organization remain reliable under the actual constraints of a fully digital exam.

5. An incomplete better answer cannot earn points for portions never written. A complete imperfect response can still accumulate independent rubric points.